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Mission News

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AMASE 2007: Winds and Changes

08.21.07

I awoke this morning at five am to find myself swaying in my bed. Sometime
during the night the wind had picked up dramatically and large waves had
developed where we were anchored near shore. For a brief while I thought we
had started sailing a day early, but the shore remained fixed through the
small porthole in my cabin.

During our morning meeting, we discovered that the waves were too big for us
to safely take the Zodiacs to shore. We discussed leaving for our next site
early, but the equipment in the lab needs to be tied down before we go and
many of us are too nauseous to do much at the moment. The management team
has decided we should stay put for a while, people can wait for the motion
sickness medicine to kick in then we'll meet up after lunch to reassess the
situation.

Its 3pm and we've decided to continue hanging out in the same place. The
ship has drifted a bit down the shore. Everyone is inside, huddled in
various lab spaces catching up on work. The most exciting event was a near
miss with a giant iceberg an hour ago. Or so we thought.

We heard strange loud noises coming from the ship so Oliver and I ran out on
the deck to check it out. There was huge iceberg just off the bow. It looked
like Lance was trying to rotate and get away from the iceberg, but every now
and then we would suddenly get close again. We discovered that the Raman
team had actually asked how close we could get to an iceberg so they could
attempt to measure it with their laser from the ship's deck. The idea
sounded pretty crazy, but it would be so cool if it worked! In the end, they
were unable to make their attempt because the ship was bouncing too much in
the waves for the instrument to sit safely on deck.

At 5:30pm I exited my cabin for dinner and found the boat deserted. While I
had been inside, Lance had sailed into a calmer bay and everyone had gone on
shore for a walk around! Somehow I had missed the call and never realized
that everyone had left! I was pretty bummed to not be on shore as the
evening had brought blue skies and bright sunshine. To cheer myself up, I
spent some quality time reading a Norwegian fishing magazine with Morton up
in the bridge. The view from the panoramic windows of the bridge was
spectacular and much warmer than from on deck. I watched the folks onshore
through binoculars and joined them for dinner when they returned. It sounds
like it will be a neat new Wahlenberg Fjord field site next year.